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User blog:Holomanga/Transhuman, Posthuman, Inhuman
Polyhedron69 has posted a very interesting blog post on the future of humanity, including transhumanism, posthumanism, and a speculative ultimohumanism. It’s a great blog post, and it’s recommended reading for this blog post. I propose a different, but similar metric of x-humanism: where they are in mindspace. Mindspace is an imaginary space in which minds lie. A “mind” is anything that produces models of the world and then performs actions based on predictions from that model; almost all humans have minds, as well as animals, and some artificial intelligences. Minds that are similar to each other are nearby in mindspace, and minds that are far away from each other are far away in mindspace. A map of mindspace is to the left. You might notice that it looks a lot like my Discord profile picture. This is because I am a big fan of the concept of mindspace, and also because it was the first roughly-circular image that I saw in my images folder. All of humanity is very close together in mindspace indeed. The human mind is built based on genetics, and these genetics were all exposed to the same selection pressures. Every human to have ever lived was built to be an endurance hunter on the African savannah, and, because of that, they’re all quite close to each other. These are the naturalhumans. However, the space of minds that can be occupied by natural humans isn’t quite the same as the space of minds that can be occupied by humans. There are a lot of changes that you can make that would never be made which would give you someone who is still mentally human. They might be smarter, and they might have different emotions, and they might have memories stretching back centuries, but they’re still human. This couldn’t occur in nature – we’re all human-level intelligences with endurance-hunter emotions and short life spans – but with technology in the future. These are the transhumans. And then there’s more. These transhumans, as they grow, will eventually tread more of mindspace, beyond what you would think of as human. There’s only so much give on emotions, on intelligence, on instincts, before you get something that’s not human. Each consensual change that a transhuman makes to their own mind drifts them to somewhere further from the tiny cluster that makes up human minds. As they get further, they might set a goal for their mind that takes them further. In other words, there’s a patch of transtranshuman mindspace centered around each transhuman that would include every mind that’s recognisably them, and, as they grow up, they might enter somewhere in that space. The aggregation of all of this, these nonhumans that transhumans might grow up into, is the posthumans. There’s a lot of space that can be posthuman; anything that was once a human is a posthuman, after all. How do we get further than posthumans? Even in the limit, there are some places of mindspace that a posthuman would not tread, too alien or foolish or lacking in value to dare entering. However, there’s no reason why a naturalhuman has to be the starting point. There are intelligences that might not even be posthuman, like chess-playing AIs or exotic aliens, that offer a different starting point. These regions might even overlap, though there would be regions inaccessible to both – a chess AI, twice transcended, might look just like a human twice transcended, but the chess AI would never box itself back into being human in the same way that the posthuman would never box itself into being a chess AI. (Or, they might. Feel free to replace this with your own example.) The regions of post-inhuman space that are outside of our posthuman space, but also can overlap at some point, make up the inhumans, a strange region of mindspace that none of us might ever explore, though we may be able to meet and understand some beings that have. (And beyond? Minds that would never show up naturally, produced in exhaustive searches for truly alien mentalities. Things that aren’t even minds, but still optimise, like natural selection.) Category:Blog posts